At risk of dating myself, I remember the (very brief) rise and
(anticlimactic) fall of the Digital Compact Cassette,
although I was a bit poor to be in the target market of early adopters
and hi-fi-philes that the first decks were targeted to. And while the
Ars article is decent, it ignores the elephant in the room that
contributed mightily to DCC’s demise: DRM.

DCC was burdened by a DRM system called SCMS, also
present in the consumer version of DAT. This inclusion was not
the fault of Philips or Matsushita (later Panasonic), who designed
DCC, but a result of an odious RIAA-backed law passed in 1992, the Audio
Home Recording Act, which mandated it in all “digital audio
recording device[s]”.

It is telling that of the variety of formats which were encumbered by
SCMS, exactly zero of them have ever succeeded in the marketplace in a
way that threatened the dominant formats. The AHRA was (and remains,
de jure, because it’s still out there on the books, a piece of legal
“unexploded ordnance” waiting for someone to step on it) the RIAA’s
most potent and successful weapon in terms of suppressing
technological advancement and maintaining the status quo throughout
the 1990s.

Had it not been for the AHRA and SCMS, I think it’s likely that US
consumers might have had not one but two alternative formats for
digital music besides the CD, and perhaps three: consumer DAT, DCC,
and MiniDisc. Of these, DAT is probably the best format from a
pure-technology perspective – it squeezes more data into a smaller
physical space than the other two, eliminating the need for lossy
audio compression – but DAT decks are mechanically complex, owing to
their helical scan system, and the smallest portable DATs never got
down to Walkman size. DCC, on the other hand, used a more robust
linear tape system, and perhaps most importantly it was compatible
with analog cassette tapes. I think there is a very good chance that
it could have won the battle, if the combatants had been given a
chance to take the field.

But the AHRA and SCMS scheme conspired to make both consumer-grade DAT
and DCC unappealing. Unlike today, where users have been slowly
conditioned to accept that their devices will oppose them at every
opportunity in the service of corporations and their revenue streams,
audio enthusiasts from the analog era were understandably hostile to
the idea that their gear might stop them from doing something it was
otherwise quite physically capable of doing, like dubbing from one
tape to another, or from a CD to a tape, in the digital domain. And a
tax on blank media just made the price premium for digital, as opposed
to analog, that much higher. If you are only allowed to make a single
generation of copies due to SCMS, and if you’re going to pay extra for
the digital media due to the AHRA, why not just get a nice analog deck
with Dolby C or DBX Type 2 noise reduction, and spend
the savings on a boatload of high-quality Type IV metal
cassettes?

That was the question that I remember asking myself anyway, at the
time. I never ended up buying a DCC deck, and like most of the world
continued listening to LPs, CDs, and analog cassettes right up until
cheap computer-based CD-Rs and then MP3 files dragged the world of
recorded music fully into the digital age, and out of the shadow of
the AHRA.